Fedora 36 Planning To Use plocate As New "locate" Replacement

Fedora 36 is planning to use plocate as its new provider of the locate command for finding files on file-systems. Plocate should make for even faster locating of files on disk as well as doing so using less CPU cycles.

Currently Fedora uses mlocate as its locate command while for the next Fedora Linux release they intend to move to Plocate as a compatible re-implementation.

Using Plocate should make for a much faster locate implementation as it makes use of liburing for leveraging IO_uring and libzstd for faster I/O and compression of the updatedb database. While Fedora is often on the leading edge of such changes, this time around Debian already switched to plocate by default and Fedora would be following suit.

Per the project site, plocate can take less than half the time of mlocate while also having a much smaller database too.

The details on the change can be found via the Fedora Wiki. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of plocate being the default on Fedora 36. Long story short, if you use locate, it should be faster and more efficient with F36 in the spring.